When chattel slavery ended, the mass of Blacks were then thrust into a feudal situation in contrast to the conditions of capitalist slavery, where they were in bitter contradiction to the planter ruling class, when the host of whites, based on the disease created by racial slavery, actually wanted to become planters, and despised the Black slaves because often they said the slaves lived better than the poor whites, whose condition Du Bois describes in chilling detail.
Sharecropping was a kind of feudal recidivism, where instead of becoming a small land-owning peasant class, Black people were now transformed into semi-proletarian agricultural workers, plagued now by The Black Codes (which Du Bois describes as the South looking backwards toward slavery and never ahead to the resolution of these conflicts). Andrew Johnson is analyzed at length in Black Reconstruction because of the grim irony which places this poor white southerner at the head of the nation by the end of the Civil War. And where he had heretofore been characterized as staunchly against the rich and the planter class particularly, in a few months, based on his “inability” (which he shared with many of the poor whites) to envision a South where Blacks and whites had equal rights. Du Bois implies that Secretary of State Seward, who was always less than supportive of Lincoln’s decision to seek full suffrage for the ex-slaves, was an important influence on Johnson. But he also implies that the huge wealth the new northern imperialists were paying out had a little to do with Johnson’s conversion to reaction.
It was Johnson who dismantled the Freedman’s Bureau, which in its glorious futility had actually imposed a dictatorship of the working class and small farmers in the South, and had begun to distribute the forty acres and a mule that the two U.S. Senators who represented the Abolitionist Democratic philosophy, as Republican politicians, had put forth because they understood without some economic base, and with that, equal access to the ballot, education and a productive livelihood, the ex-slaves could not possibly become “citizens.” It was Johnson, as well, again with Seward’s urging, who immediately allowed the southern secessionists to re-enter the union, thus leaving the ex-slaves at the brutal hands of those who were looking backward, and those who sought to re-enslave Black people, which they did, as soon as possible. The book The Economics of Barbarism by J. Kucynski and M. Witt, points out that the Black Codes were Hitler’s model for his Nazi racial laws.
The overthrow of the Reconstruction actually united fronts of workers and small farmers, heaved Afro America into fascism. There is no other term for it. The overthrow of democratically elected governments and the rule by direct terror, by the most reactionary sector of finance capital, as Dimitrov termed it. Carried out with murder, intimidation and robbery, by the first storm troopers, again the Hitlerian prototype, the Ku Klux Klan, directly financed by northern capital.
What the masses of racially twisted white southerners did not understand was that the overthrow of Reconstruction was necessary not just for pitching Black people into American fascism, but for the complete triumph of imperialism. Since the Plantation Owners, “The Planters,” were the last force of competitive capitalism removed in order for imperialism to shoulder its way into power in the U.S. Du Bois says it was not until it was too late that the mass of working class and middle-class whites realized that the so-called “Redemption of the South” was actually the defeat of democracy for the entire South and the U.S. nation as well. By 1896, not only was Booker T telling the U.S. rulers that “the wisest of my race understand the folly of struggling for equality” but the U.S. was poised for its entrance onto the stage of big-time imperialism announced by the Spanish-American War.
Lenin points out in his Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, and also in Critical Remarks on the National Question that national chauvinism is the most finished form of opportunism, in which the rulers can get the workers of one nation to fight the workers of another. The South is obvious as an example of such deep and constantly justified opportunism, not just the crude racial chauvinism of the clearly ignorant, but the smooth b.s. of the various “educated” classes as well as the political forces.
This opportunism, manifest as national or racial chauvinism, has been historically widespread in the U.S. and is the single most damning weapon the bourgeoisie use to prevent broad class unity of a multinational working class. Du Bois points out that this chauvinism, this racism, is not left to spontaneity by the rulers. For sixty years, he says, after the Civil War, the media was filled with sick distortions and attacks on Black people (like today) to hide the heroic anti-slavery image that emerged as a result of Black struggle against slavery. Stepin Fetchit, Sleep and Eat, Birmingham and the various frightened, dishonest, funny negro foils were put forward to justify the U.S. determination not to grant equality to the ex-slaves, and to use these demeaning portraits as “proof” that Black people did not have the capacity for equality. Today we have the media in the same role, read the newspaper any day or look at the TV, count the anti-black stories, plus we even have some of the same bogus sham theories that dotted the nineteenth century proving Black “inferiority”; today we have The Bell Curve and Stanley Crouch.
Andrew Johnson’s point position in overthrowing Reconstruction and imposing a racial fascism on Afro America and the Afro American people readied the whole of the U.S. nation for imperialist rule, which today has moved to complete control of the entire nation. The international network of finance capital has used its enormous power and wealth to dupe both the East and the West into a “cold war” and through this wrested billions and billions of dollars from nations, which all went into its coffers. Imperialism thus was able to bribe and finally overthrow the Soviet Union, but at the same time compromise the national or native bourgeoisie of most countries in the world, including the United States. By plundering all nations’ treasuries, imperialism could then put itself in charge worldwide through such imperialist loan sharks as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, thereby ruling the world by holding all the nations’ purse strings. This is the reason for such a sharp upsurge of nationalism, especially on the extreme right because the social base of this nationalism is the national bourgeoisie and petit bourgeoisie, driven to outrage by their robbery and loss of status and democracy. Today the U.S. is governed by an imperialist ruling class, not even by its own national bourgeoisie. Notice, for instance, in the last election, the pitiful Perot could not even get to debate. It is the New World Order running the U.S., as it has moved to do openly since the Kennedy assassination, and a further sickening irony that both Kennedy and Lincoln were killed for obstructing the imperialist program for the Afro American people, and both were succeeded by Dudes from the South named Johnson. Obstruction to imperialist plans for Latin America must also be included in the assassination motive, Mexico and Central America generally for Lincoln, Cuba particularly was Kennedy’s cause of death.
Imperialism was the triumph of opportunism, national oppression and Big capital of the northern banks and industrialists. The destruction of the Black democracy provided the necessary capital for international U.S. imperialist investment and annexation.
This was a period of the upsurge of Imperialism internationally. By 1888 the European powers met to divide up Africa, chattel slaves now replaced with Colonialism, the enslaving of the whole of Africa. The financial panic of 1873 was the economic ground for the 1876 Hayes-Tilden compromise, in which the ex-slaves and the whole South were officially returned to the fascist rule of the comprador southern middle classes. With the Black Codes, any white citizen could arrest, question, beat and even kill any Black person, like the recent Louisiana legislation that any citizen can shoot any person suspected of trying to steal his or her car.
The leadership of the Afro American people was a petit bourgeoisie not really interested in Self-Determination as much as “getting into the U.S.,” focusing on their own narrow class interests more than the liberation of the whole people. The white leadership were sycophants of capitalism, whose mindset made them willing compradors,
twisted gauleiters of a Wall Street “Neue Ordnung.” The American Revolution had, in Marx’s words, provided a leap up the social scale for the petit bourgeoisie, so the Civil War and end of chattel slavery provided a similar boost for the working class, but the destruction of Black democracy trashed all of that, with the ignorant collaboration of white workers and farmers “souped up” on white supremacy.
In 1879, the Paris Commune erupted, and like the ending of chattel slavery, the French working class should have continued the armed struggle … marched on Versailles, Marx says, just as the Afro American working class in strategic alliance with small and middle farmers and what democratic petit bourgeoisie existed, should have declared for Self-Determination and taken up arms again and fought for the Democratic Dictatorship of the working class, a People’s democracy and a United Front government for Afro America, which is a multinational oppressed nation in the Black Belt South.
The proffering of U.S. citizenship, while legitimately intended by Lincoln and the abolitionist democracy he had come to represent, was suddenly an ugly lie. The Emancipation Proclamation has removed all relationship between the Afro American people and the secessionist South. Without the guarantee of democracy, made real by the gaining of political and economic self-determination and access to education, the re-enslaving of the Afro American people, the transformation of the Black South into an oppressed nation, was clear.
Du Bois spoke about “a nation within a nation”; he meant the self-determination of the Afro American people’s revolutionary democratic struggle moving forward with national and anti-imperialist unity and the creation of economic and cultural cooperatives including education. Despite the bogus reentrance into the American union, the southern states still fly the confederate battle flags and U.S. apartheid did not end, de jure, until 1954; it has been equally clear that the South has never varied its backward-looking subjugation of Afro America, which has been permitted and joined in by the entire U.S. nation, where today, another Du Bois prediction, the entire U.S. is being “turned into a prototype of the South.”
What the great Dr. Du Bois did was lay out the entire spectrum of the centralmost aspect of what characterizes the U.S. nation state, the most illuminating and concrete historical, class-conscious and scholarly study ever published in the U.S. The incredible pantheon of his writings, a bibliography that covers political journalism and social criticism, especially the articles in The Crisis, which he edited; scholarly and academic writings in sociology, social and political history, Pan African studies, education and literary and cultural studies. The major sociological studies, as well as six novels and a great deal of poetry, and even a historical pageant. The magazine articles alone measure some 10,000! The Souls of Black Folk (1903); The Negro (1915); Black Reconstruction (1935); The World & Africa (1947) and The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois (1968) would be good places to begin to access this giant. His The Philadelphia Negro (1899) was the initial U.S. work and catalyst for urban sociology. His Harvard doctoral thesis, “The Suppression of the African Slave Trade” (1896), is still in print!
Panels for Nathanael
Eli Gottlieb
1.
IN HIS COLLECTION OF epigrams The Secret Heart of the Clock, Elias Canetti wrote: “At the edge of the abyss, we cling to pencils.” In Nathanael West’s version, we jump. And we laugh as we fall—a scalding, mocking laughter, the abyssal laughter of we-have-nothing-left-to-lose. Not a typical satirist (from the Latin, saturus, literally “filled or charged with a variety of things”), West belongs to what we might term the Heroic-Caustic branch of the literary pantheon. To wit: nothing in his books is built or upheld, nothing grieved over; all is a falling-away, and the emotional tone of the writing is one of spectacular, remorseless negation. As West himself said, “Not only is there nothing to root for in my work … but what is worse, no rooters.” Published in the reformist-minded 1930s, West’s novels presented an evil-twin alternative portrait of the America seen in the “proletarian” novels of coevals Steinbeck, Sinclair, Farrell and Dos Passos. In his books you will find no set pieces on the hygiene of slaughterhouses, nor warmly written passages on the brotherhood of hobos; no soaring hymns to the industrial might of America or “picturesque” depictions of the marginal and alienated. West’s America is brittle, deeply violent, depthless, loud, scarifyingly unfair and as bright as a new toy. This America traffics happily in images of bucolic splendor while grinding people to bits in the urban clockworks. It drapes patriotic banners over its most murderous acts and tactfully draws the screen of “democracy” around its own proximity to mob rule. It proposes as a final reward for long service the state (in both senses) of “California,” which turns out to be a jail of boredom, crammed with latent violence and guarded by palm trees. Not unsurprisingly, in this province of disappointed expectations, there is one delusion that stands out above the rest: romantic love. Love, in West’s books, even more than religion, civic zeal or national pride, constitutes the biggest, most ludicrous, most necessary sham of all, and he lays bare its grandeurs like a med student pithing a dog.
2.
As novelist, he is intriguingly elusive, a shape-shifter, a protean wearer of authorial hats. Each of his books employs a new narrative template. His first novel, The Dream Life of Balso Snell, is a mediocre pottage of juvenile bathroom jokes leavened with highbrow allegorical references. His second book, Miss Lonelyhearts, is an astonishingly achieved novel, bearing as little resemblance to its antecedent as Leaves of Grass did to the wretched Whitmanian doggerel that preceded it. A Cool Million, his third, is a waste of his gifts, though it has a following among his contemporary devotees, and his fourth, The Day of the Locust, is shot through with brilliantly imagined scenes, which never entirely quite hang together as an ensemble.
A useful way to understand a body of work this variegated is through the Kafka paradigm. The Kafka paradigm suggests that the less obviously connected a Jewish writer is to Jewish themes or issues, the more deeply Jewish his writing is at bottom. Like many self-hating Jewish writers, West (born Weinstein) renounced all claims to the religion of his birth and seemed, for that, the more crucially, exactly Jewish. His apocalyptic, deadpan humor and ironic self-detachment, his Testamentary ferocity and his sense of writing as hurtling forward along a chain of collapsing expectations stamp him as an essential member of the ingathering of Isaac Babel, Harold Brodkey and Philip Roth—though he occupies a darker, more lexically fraught corner of it than they do. West was the writer Walter Benjamin would have been if he’d grown up and learned to hunt and fish in America.
The lone book out of all his work which represents the perfect fusion of his artistic means and his creative will is Miss Lonelyhearts. A fiery dance of literary binaries—academic and vernacular, tender and violent, sacred and profane, comic and pathetic—the novel is recounted in the spooling frames of a comic strip and moves with the inner logic of a fever dream. It tells of a few weeks in the life of a desolate advice columnist to the lovelorn who is detached from his faith, his girl, his job and finally his life in a kind of forced march to the verge of nonbeing. The beauty and the originality of the book reside in its supersaturated prose and the architectonics of its spaces. It is built like a Bach fugue or a soaring tensegrity structure, with each sentence sharing equal load-bearing weight and a feeling of seamlessly phased recurrence of parts-of-the-whole. Harold Bloom, with good reason, calls the novel “the perfected instance of a negative vision in American prose fiction.”
Nathanael West. Courtesy New Directions Publishing Corporation.
Brandishing his artistic credo (“A novelist can afford to be anything but dull”), West wrote Miss Lonelyhearts at the Flaubertian rate of a hundred words a day, each of them sounded out loud in the country air of a cabin in upstate New York. The result, aside from the drastic compression of the language, was a panoply of specialized effects similar to those of Expressionist film, in which a spotlight picks out a telling detail on an otherwise dark stage: lock or keyri
ng. Arising out of the dense weave of the prose, these moments employ percussive metaphors to make West’s larger point: that man is continually in danger of becoming a thing. The sky looks “as if it had been rubbed with a soiled eraser.” A woman’s arms are “round and smooth, like wood that has been turned by the sea.” Miss Lonelyhearts’ tongue is “a fat thumb,” his heart is “a congealed lump of icy fat.” A colleague at his paper has cheeks “like twin rolls of smooth pink toilet paper.”
The only place where the seething, corrosive irony of the prose surface lets up is in West’s descriptions of the natural world. An avid outdoorsman, West in later years kept a brace of bloodhounds as pets, the better to hunt with, and his caressing, sensual, yet oddly Cubist descriptions of plants and landscapes are clearly the product of affectionate observation: “There was no wind to disturb the pull of the earth. The new green leaves hung straight down and shone in the hot sun like an army of little metal shields. Somewhere in the woods a thrush was singing. Its sound was like that of a flute choked with saliva.”
When Miss Lonelyhearts is dragged away to the country by his girlfriend, he has to admit, “even to himself, that the pale new leaves, shaped and colored like candle flames, were beautiful, and that the air smelt clean and alive.”
It was part of West’s genius in Miss Lonelyhearts to stretch a fine skin of caricature over the point-by-point presentation of his story and at the same time tune his ear for dialogue and emotional nuance to such a pitch as to produce real felt inhabited interaction between the characters. The sheerness of this interface, the slipperiness of this linkage, as it slides often within individual sentences from satire to laceration, comic sublimity to heartbreak, is without peer in American literature.
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